Insane Black and White Conversion Control!

Tell your friends you are a Black and White Conversion Boss after watching this tutorial!

Coming up in the next 24 hours or so I have a webinar with the Photoshop and Lightroom Group for their Adobe Connect Event. I will be showing how to Master Tone and Color in Photoshop. Obviously this cannot be done in one 1 hour session. However, it will leave you with the burning passion to pursue the two most important aspects of image editing.

A couple of things I want to cover in great detail, but I know I will not have the time to hit all of them, are Black and White Conversions and how they affect the color in your images. A Black and White Conversion is not just a Black and White Conversion, there is a lot that goes into it and when you know how each one affects color you can convert to black and white like a boss without the use of plugins and extra software.

In this video tutorial I will be showing you the following Black and White Conversion methods:

Grayscale Mode

Hue/Saturation Adjustment

Channel Mixer

Black and White Conversion Adjustment Layer

LAB Mode

Gradient Map

There are a lot of Black and White Conversions out there, but these seem to be the best and most reliable. However, you will see that they all produce VERY different results!

Thank you for the awesome tutorial on the various b/w modes. This is very clear and explains the differences in ways that I never got a grasp of. I am like you, I can see the positives in using gradient for the conversions as you still retain all the tonal range of the image. Then you just make it fit your style by moving the adjustments. How simple is that?

Your B&W tutorial is so amazing and very nicely explained. I have already seen the difference in some of my photos. I am not sure though how I can make further adjustments to the B&W convergence . I tried using Hue and Sat adjustment layer but does not seem to make any difference. I am obviously doing something wrong. Can you please clarify ?
Kumar

Sure! You can make a gradient Map layer on top of a hue/sat layer. Set the Gradient Map to Black and White and then use the hue/sat layer to control the tone of each color. Here is a video tutorial for it:

Thank you so much for actually sending a video to explain . I now know where I was going wrong . I was converting to B&W before using Hue and Saturation. . Was not thinking straight. Will have to dig out some old photos and have a go.
Thanks again !
Kumar